Sure, Madonna english hawthorn have scandalized the Vatican and shocked nearly every parent in America at some point during her long and provocative life history full of shrewd persona transformations.
But as the Material Girl hits the half-century mark this weekend, she may be stepping into a office that fifty-fifty she, with all her marketing savvy, might non have dreamed up: bill poster child for the 50-and-fabulous set.
Who cares about those recent sheet headlines linking her to the Yankees' A-Rod, or that tell-all book by her blood brother? Many women of a certain age look at Madonna and see a wonderfully fit, stylish, vigorous woman who's made a fortune based on smarts, talent and ambition - no "Blond Ambition" puns, please - and exactly keeps on going. Her latest worldly concern tour, "Sticky & Sweet," kicks turned in Wales a week after her Aug. 16 birthday.
Talk near your New 50.
"I just now think she's awesome," says Dale Lieberman, a 55-year-old mother of two fully grown daughters world Health Organization works at a Marleton, N.J., dress up shop and seemingly shares little with Madonna, economize their age demographic. Yet Lieberman thinks Madonna is a expectant example of what 50 can be like these days.
"Here's a woman that's successful, takes care of herself, looks amazing - and she took the steps to get there. It doesn't happen unless you accept charge. She's a gravid role mannequin for many, many women."
And if Madonna has any qualms around reaching this milestone - she isn't speaking publicly about it - Lieberman wants to reassure her: It'll be just fine. In fact, better than fine.
"When I was in my 30s, 50 just seemed so ancient to me," says Lieberman. Now, she says, her kids are both out in the reality. She exercises regularly for the first time in her life. She's weeded out the unsatisfying relationships in favor of the truly literal ones, enjoys nature, and loves to travel with her hubby (they're planning a trip to the Amazon next.) "Sometimes it's scary how happy and fulfilled I feel," says Lieberman.
That's secure news not just for Madonna, simply for all the others reaching 50 in 2008 - and some renowned names pop up. Michael Jackson and Prince ar two of the to the highest degree discussed. But there's too Ellen DeGeneres, Sharon Stone, Christiane Amanpour. Alec Baldwin, Viggo Mortensen. Andie MacDowell, Jamie Lee Curtis, original "Sex and the City" columnist Candace Bushnell. Michelle Pfeiffer, Annette Bening, Prince Albert of Monaco. And, linking them together as in one of those "Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon" small beer games: Kevin Bacon.
Madonna's milestone should inhale men as well as women, says David Zinczenko, editor in chief of Men's Health magazine. "I was in high school when she hit it big," says Zinczenko, who's in his late 30s. "Now that her low young fans are in their 30s, we look at Madonna as sort of a harbinger of the future for us. And the future looks pretty good."
What it tells us, Zinczenko adds, "is that ageing is not the inevitableness that we might have assumed by watching our fathers, at once in their 50s and 60s. Madonna is proof that physical exertion and feeding right at an early age pays off."
Of line, some could rightly point out that it's easier to continue fit when you privy afford private trainers and servants. Or possibly a little coolness and rapier? Madonna's cheek appears on the electric current cover of New York magazine as an example of the latest hot looks in plastic surgery, though she hasn't aforesaid whether she's gone under the tongue or needle.
More power to her, says Lesley Jane Seymour, editor program of More, a mag for women over 40.
"So she's had some work - I'll take it," says Seymour. "I want to acknowledge who her doctor is! It's actually hard to believe she's 50. She looks 40. And she just keeps going at it, living life and loving life."
To Seymour, Madonna's not only an example to women on how to turn older - she's a reflection of how, as a club, our perceptions of years have changed. Especially 50, which victimized to be seen as the root of a depressing decline, not a new chapter.
It starts with looking different. "Put a picture of a 50-year-old woman today next to one from my mother's generation," says Seymour, wHO recently passed the mark herself. "We look at least 10 to 15 years younger than they did." She attributes it to example, better skin care, sun protection, less smoking, and generally a different criterion of health and well-being.
"Also, 50 really is a new starting time for so many women," says Seymour, who notes that life expectancy rates show the average U.S. woman has another 30 years to live past the half-century mark. "Many have accomplished a telephone number of their goals already. Their children are getting older. For the first time they can rattling think around themselves, and ask: What do I want from life?"
Of grade, sometimes they can't receive it. Women trying to return to the work force - or to progress within it - often feel that forward age is an obstacle. And in popular culture, age is still something we swallow in our male icons much more than easily than in our female ones. In movies, a recent exception was the "Sex and the City" film, which appealed to sr. women because of its portrayal of the recent 40s and 50s as a still-sexy time of life.
Joanne Bamberger, a mercenary writer and blogger in Washington, D.C., hasn't sour 50 in time - she has deuce whole months to go. She's ambivalent. But, she quips, "as the bromide goes, I guess it's better than the alternative."
"I just don't feel like what 50 should find like," says Bamberger, wHO has an 8-year-old adopted daughter. "I remember my grandmother at 50. Her hair was completely edward D. White. My mother, too, was just at a very different place in her life than I am now."
Some years Bamberger asks herself, "How did I get to be this age?" But mostly she appreciates the perspective that being older has given her. She says she feels more than settled personally now than in her 30s, when she was struggling with whether to have kids, but less settled professionally, having left hand a full-time career as a lawyer to compose and care for her daughter.
Bamberger has always admired Madonna, especially for her shrewd ability to accommodate her double. "She's through with a remarkable job of marketing herself, and she's always been able to reinvent herself," says Bamberger.
So how does Madonna feel about the impending birthday? The pop star is not speech production publicly about it, says her longtime publicist, Liz Rosenberg. "I'm sure she's happy to be an inspiration to women and men of any age," Rosenberg wrote in an e-mail. But the birthday, she illustrious wryly, "is not quite the bench mark for her as it seems to be in the media, who have been talking about her 50th since she off 40!"
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